OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
FreSaDa: A French Satire Data Set for Cross-Domain Satire Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we introduce FreSaDa, a French Satire Data Set, which is composed of 11,570 articles from the news domain. In order to avoid reporting unreasonably high accuracy rates due to the learning of characteristics specific to publication sources, we divided our samples into training, validation and test, such that the training publication sources are distinct from the validation and test publication sources. This gives rise to a cross-domain (cross-source) satire detection task. We employ two classification methods as baselines for our new data set, one based on low-level features (character n-grams) and one based on high-level features (average of CamemBERT word embeddings). As an additional contribution, we present an unsupervised domain adaptation method based on regarding the pairwise similarities (given by the dot product) between the training samples and the validation samples as features. By including these domain-specific features, we attain significant improvements for both character n-grams and CamemBERT embeddings.
Student Barriers to Active Learning in Synchronous Online Classes: Characterization, Reflections, and Suggestions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

As more and more face-to-face classes move to online environments, it becomes increasingly important to explore any emerging barriers to students' learning. This work focuses on characterizing student barriers to active learning in synchronous online environments. The aim is to help novice educators develop a better understanding of those barriers and prepare more student-centered course plans for their active online classes. Towards this end, we adopt a qualitative research approach and study information from different sources: social media content, interviews, and surveys from students and expert educators. Through a thematic analysis, we craft a nuanced list of students' online active learning barriers within the themes of human-side, technological, and environmental barriers. Each barrier is explored from the three aspects of frequency, importance, and exclusiveness to active online classes. Finally, we conduct a summative study with 12 novice educators and explain the benefits of using our barrier list for course planning in active online classes.
SGD Implicitly Regularizes Generalization Error
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We derive a simple and model-independent formula for the change in the generalization gap due to a gradient descent update. We then compare the change in the test error for stochastic gradient descent to the change in test error from an equivalent number of gradient descent updates and show explicitly that stochastic gradient descent acts to regularize generalization error by decorrelating nearby updates. These calculations depends on the details of the model only through the mean and covariance of the gradient distribution, which may be readily measured for particular models of interest. We discuss further improvements to these calculations and comment on possible implications for stochastic optimization.
MPPI-VS: Sampling-Based Model Predictive Control Strategy for Constrained Image-Based and Position-Based Visual Servoing
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we open up new avenues for visual servoing systems built upon the Path Integral (PI) optimal control theory, in which the non-linear partial differential equation (PDE) can be transformed into an expectation over all possible trajectories using the Feynman-Kac (FK) lemma. More precisely, we propose an MPPI-VS control strategy, a real-time and inversion-free control strategy on the basis of sampling-based model predictive control (namely, Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control) algorithm, for both image-based, 3D point, and position-based visual servoing techniques, taking into account the system constraints (such as visibility, 3D, and control constraints) and parametric uncertainties associated with the robot and camera models as well as measurement noise. Contrary to classical visual servoing control schemes, our control strategy directly utilizes the approximation of the interaction matrix, without the need for estimating the interaction matrix inversion or performing the pseudo-inversion. We validate the MPPI-VS control strategy as well as the classical control schemes on a 6-DoF Cartesian robot with an eye-in-hand camera based on the utilization of four points in the image plane as visual features. To better assess and demonstrate the robustness and potential advantages of our proposed control strategy compared to classical schemes, intensive simulations under various operating conditions are carried out and then discussed. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness and capability of the proposed scheme in coping easily with the system constraints, as well as its robustness in the presence of large errors in camera parameters and measurements.
Fine-Grained Attention for Weakly Supervised Object Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Although recent advances in deep learning accelerated an improvement in a weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) task, there are still challenges to identify the entire body of an object, rather than only discriminative parts. In this paper, we propose a novel residual fine-grained attention (RFGA) module that autonomously excites the less activated regions of an object by utilizing information distributed over channels and locations within feature maps in combination with a residual operation. To be specific, we devise a series of mechanisms of triple-view attention representation, attention expansion, and feature calibration. Unlike other attention-based WSOL methods that learn a coarse attention map, having the same values across elements in feature maps, our proposed RFGA learns fine-grained values in an attention map by assigning different attention values for each of the elements. We validated the superiority of our proposed RFGA module by comparing it with the recent methods in the literature over three datasets. Further, we analyzed the effect of each mechanism in our RFGA and visualized attention maps to get insights.
SIGAN: A Novel Image Generation Method for Solar Cell Defect Segmentation and Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Solar cell electroluminescence (EL) defect segmentation is an interesting and challenging topic. Many methods have been proposed for EL defect detection, but these methods are still unsatisfactory due to the diversity of the defect and background. In this paper, we provide a new idea of using generative adversarial network (GAN) for defect segmentation. Firstly, the GAN-based method removes the defect region in the input defective image to get a defect-free image, while keeping the background almost unchanged. Then, the subtracted image is obtained by making difference between the defective input image with the generated defect-free image. Finally, the defect region can be segmented through thresholding the subtracted image. To keep the background unchanged before and after image generation, we propose a novel strong identity GAN (SIGAN), which adopts a novel strong identity loss to constraint the background consistency. The SIGAN can be used not only for defect segmentation, but also small-samples defective dataset augmentation. Moreover, we release a new solar cell EL image dataset named as EL-2019, which includes three types of images: crack, finger interruption and defect-free. Experiments on EL-2019 dataset show that the proposed method achieves 90.34% F-score, which outperforms many state-of-the-art methods in terms of solar cell defects segmentation results.
Supervised Feature Selection Techniques in Network Intrusion Detection: a Critical Review
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Machine Learning (ML) techniques are becoming an invaluable support for network intrusion detection, especially in revealing anomalous flows, which often hide cyber-threats. Typically, ML algorithms are exploited to classify/recognize data traffic on the basis of statistical features such as inter-arrival times, packets length distribution, mean number of flows, etc. Dealing with the vast diversity and number of features that typically characterize data traffic is a hard problem. This results in the following issues: i) the presence of so many features leads to lengthy training processes (particularly when features are highly correlated), while prediction accuracy does not proportionally improve; ii) some of the features may introduce bias during the classification process, particularly those that have scarce relation with the data traffic to be classified. To this end, by reducing the feature space and retaining only the most significant features, Feature Selection (FS) becomes a crucial pre-processing step in network management and, specifically, for the purposes of network intrusion detection. In this review paper, we complement other surveys in multiple ways: i) evaluating more recent datasets (updated w.r.t. obsolete KDD 99) by means of a designed-from-scratch Python-based procedure; ii) providing a synopsis of most credited FS approaches in the field of intrusion detection, including Multi-Objective Evolutionary techniques; iii) assessing various experimental analyses such as feature correlation, time complexity, and performance. Our comparisons offer useful guidelines to network/security managers who are considering the incorporation of ML concepts into network intrusion detection, where trade-offs between performance and resource consumption are crucial.
On Probabilistic Termination of Functional Programs with Continuous Distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2021
Year: 2021

We study termination of higher-order probabilistic functional programs with recursion, stochastic conditioning and sampling from continuous distributions. Reasoning about the termination probability of programs with continuous distributions is hard, because the enumeration of terminating executions cannot provide any non-trivial bounds. We present a new operational semantics based on traces of intervals, which is sound and complete with respect to the standard sampling-based semantics, in which (countable) enumeration can provide arbitrarily tight lower bounds. Consequently we obtain the first proof that deciding almost-sure termination (AST) for programs with continuous distributions is $Π^0_2$-complete. We also provide a compositional representation of our semantics in terms of an intersection type system. In the second part, we present a method of proving AST for non-affine programs, i.e., recursive programs that can, during the evaluation of the recursive body, make multiple recursive calls (of a first-order function) from distinct call sites. Unlike in a deterministic language, the number of recursion call sites has direct consequences on the termination probability. Our framework supports a proof system that can verify AST for programs that are well beyond the scope of existing methods. We have constructed prototype implementations of our method of computing lower bounds of termination probability, and AST verification.
Unsupervised Learning of Explainable Parse Trees for Improved Generalisation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Recursive neural networks (RvNN) have been shown useful for learning sentence representations and helped achieve competitive performance on several natural language inference tasks. However, recent RvNN-based models fail to learn simple grammar and meaningful semantics in their intermediate tree representation. In this work, we propose an attention mechanism over Tree-LSTMs to learn more meaningful and explainable parse tree structures. We also demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed model on natural language inference, semantic relatedness, and sentiment analysis tasks and compare them with other state-of-the-art RvNN based methods. Further, we present a detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of the learned parse trees and show that the discovered linguistic structures are more explainable, semantically meaningful, and grammatically correct than recent approaches. The source code of the paper is available at https://github.com/atul04/Explainable-Latent-Structures-Using-Attention.
Social Virtual Reality: Ethical Considerations and Future Directions for An Emerging Research Space
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

The boom of commercial social virtual reality (VR) platforms in recent years has signaled the growth and wide-spread adoption of consumer VR. Social VR platforms draw aspects from traditional 2D virtual worlds where users engage in various immersive experiences, interactive activities, and choices in avatar-based representation. However, social VR also demonstrates specific nuances that extend traditional 2D virtual worlds and other online social spaces, such as full/partial body tracked avatars, experiencing mundane everyday activities in a new way (e.g., sleeping), and an immersive means to explore new and complex identities. The growing popularity has signaled interest and investment from top technology companies who each have their own social VR platforms. Thus far, social VR has become an emerging research space, mainly focusing on design strategies, communication and interaction modalities, nuanced activities, self-presentation, harassment, privacy, and self-disclosure. These recent works suggest that many questions still remain in social VR scholarship regarding how to ethically conduct research on these sites and which research areas require additional attention. Therefore, in this paper, we provide an overview of modern Social VR, critically review current scholarship in the area, raise ethical considerations for conducting research on these sites, and highlight unexplored areas.
Learn Goal-Conditioned Policy with Intrinsic Motivation for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

It is of significance for an agent to learn a widely applicable and general-purpose policy that can achieve diverse goals including images and text descriptions. Considering such perceptually-specific goals, the frontier of deep reinforcement learning research is to learn a goal-conditioned policy without hand-crafted rewards. To learn this kind of policy, recent works usually take as the reward the non-parametric distance to a given goal in an explicit embedding space. From a different viewpoint, we propose a novel unsupervised learning approach named goal-conditioned policy with intrinsic motivation (GPIM), which jointly learns both an abstract-level policy and a goal-conditioned policy. The abstract-level policy is conditioned on a latent variable to optimize a discriminator and discovers diverse states that are further rendered into perceptually-specific goals for the goal-conditioned policy. The learned discriminator serves as an intrinsic reward function for the goal-conditioned policy to imitate the trajectory induced by the abstract-level policy. Experiments on various robotic tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed GPIM method which substantially outperforms prior techniques.
Print Error Detection using Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

This paper discusses the need of an automated system for detecting print errors and the efficacy of Convolutional Neural Networks in such an application. We recognise the need of a dataset containing print error samples and propose a way to generate one artificially. We discuss the algorithms to generate such data along with the limitaions and advantages of such an apporach. Our final trained network gives a remarkable accuracy of 99.83\% in testing. We further evaluate how such efficiency was achieved and what modifications can be tested to further the results.
Dynamic Modeling of User Preferences for Stable Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

In domains where users tend to develop long-term preferences that do not change too frequently, the stability of recommendations is an important factor of the perceived quality of a recommender system. In such cases, unstable recommendations may lead to poor personalization experience and distrust, driving users away from a recommendation service. We propose an incremental learning scheme that mitigates such problems through the dynamic modeling approach. It incorporates a generalized matrix form of a partial differential equation integrator that yields a dynamic low-rank approximation of time-dependent matrices representing user preferences. The scheme allows extending the famous PureSVD approach to time-aware settings and significantly improves its stability without sacrificing the accuracy in standard top-$n$ recommendations tasks.
CoPE: Conditional image generation using Polynomial Expansions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Generative modeling has evolved to a notable field of machine learning. Deep polynomial neural networks (PNNs) have demonstrated impressive results in unsupervised image generation, where the task is to map an input vector (i.e., noise) to a synthesized image. However, the success of PNNs has not been replicated in conditional generation tasks, such as super-resolution. Existing PNNs focus on single-variable polynomial expansions which do not fare well to two-variable inputs, i.e., the noise variable and the conditional variable. In this work, we introduce a general framework, called CoPE, that enables a polynomial expansion of two input variables and captures their auto- and cross-correlations. We exhibit how CoPE can be trivially augmented to accept an arbitrary number of input variables. CoPE is evaluated in five tasks (class-conditional generation, inverse problems, edges-to-image translation, image-to-image translation, attribute-guided generation) involving eight datasets. The thorough evaluation suggests that CoPE can be useful for tackling diverse conditional generation tasks. The source code of CoPE is available at \url{https://github.com/grigorisg9gr/polynomial_nets_for_conditional_generation}.
The World as a Graph: Improving El Niño Forecasts with Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Deep learning-based models have recently outperformed state-of-the-art seasonal forecasting models, such as for predicting El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). However, current deep learning models are based on convolutional neural networks which are difficult to interpret and can fail to model large-scale atmospheric patterns. In comparison, graph neural networks (GNNs) are capable of modeling large-scale spatial dependencies and are more interpretable due to the explicit modeling of information flow through edge connections. We propose the first application of graph neural networks to seasonal forecasting. We design a novel graph connectivity learning module that enables our GNN model to learn large-scale spatial interactions jointly with the actual ENSO forecasting task. Our model, \graphino, outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning-based models for forecasts up to six months ahead. Additionally, we show that our model is more interpretable as it learns sensible connectivity structures that correlate with the ENSO anomaly pattern.
Load Balancing with Dynamic Set of Balls and Bins
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

In dynamic load balancing, we wish to distribute balls into bins in an environment where both balls and bins can be added and removed. We want to minimize the maximum load of any bin but we also want to minimize the number of balls and bins affected when adding or removing a ball or a bin. We want a hashing-style solution where we given the ID of a ball can find its bin efficiently. We are given a balancing parameter $c=1+ε$, where $ε\in (0,1)$. With $n$ and $m$ the current numbers of balls and bins, we want no bin with load above $C=\lceil c n/m\rceil$, referred to as the capacity of the bins. We present a scheme where we can locate a ball checking $1+O(\log 1/ε)$ bins in expectation. When inserting or deleting a ball, we expect to move $O(1/ε)$ balls, and when inserting or deleting a bin, we expect to move $O(C/ε)$ balls. Previous bounds were off by a factor $1/ε$. These bounds are best possible when $C=O(1)$ but for larger $C$, we can do much better: Let $f=εC$ if $C\leq \log 1/ε$, $f=ε\sqrt{C}\cdot \sqrt{\log(1/(ε\sqrt{C}))}$ if $\log 1/ε\leq C<\tfrac{1}{2ε^2}$, and $C=1$ if $C\geq \tfrac{1}{2ε^2}$. We show that we expect to move $O(1/f)$ balls when inserting or deleting a ball, and $O(C/f)$ balls when inserting or deleting a bin. For the bounds with larger $C$, we first have to resolve a much simpler probabilistic problem. Place $n$ balls in $m$ bins of capacity $C$, one ball at the time. Each ball picks a uniformly random non-full bin. We show that in expectation and with high probability, the fraction of non-full bins is $Θ(f)$. Then the expected number of bins that a new ball would have to visit to find one that is not full is $Θ(1/f)$. As it turns out, we obtain the same complexity in our more complicated scheme where both balls and bins can be added and removed.
BurstLink: Techniques for Energy-Efficient Conventional and Virtual Reality Video Display
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2021
Year: 2021

Conventional planar video streaming is the most popular application in mobile systems and the rapid growth of 360 video content and virtual reality (VR) devices are accelerating the adoption of VR video streaming. Unfortunately, video streaming consumes significant system energy due to the high power consumption of the system components (e.g., DRAM, display interfaces, and display panel) involved in this process. We propose BurstLink, a novel system-level technique that improves the energy efficiency of planar and VR video streaming. BurstLink is based on two key ideas. First, BurstLink directly transfers a decoded video frame from the host system to the display panel, bypassing the host DRAM. To this end, we extend the display panel with a double remote frame buffer (DRFB), instead of the DRAM's double frame buffer, so that the system can directly update the DRFB with a new frame while updating the panel's pixels with the current frame stored in the DRFB. Second, BurstLink transfers a complete decoded frame to the display panel in a single burst, using the maximum bandwidth of modern display interfaces. Unlike conventional systems where the frame transfer rate is limited by the pixel-update throughput of the display panel, BurstLink can always take full advantage of the high bandwidth of modern display interfaces by decoupling the frame transfer from the pixel update as enabled by the DRFB. This direct and burst frame transfer of BurstLink significantly reduces energy consumption in video display by reducing access to the host DRAM and increasing the system's residency at idle power states. We evaluate BurstLink using an analytical power model that we rigorously validate on a real modern mobile system. Our evaluation shows that BurstLink reduces system energy consumption for 4K planar and VR video streaming by 41% and 33%, respectively.